Friday, July 5, 2013

Illustration for Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Man of the Crowd" by Harry Clarke (1889-1931), first printed in 1923 (from Wikimedia Commons)

Edgar
Allan Poe’s story fragment, “The Man of the Crowd” (published in 1840 when Poe
was living between Baltimore, Richmond and Philadelphia), begins with the
narrator peering out onto a London street from a café, making observations
about passersby: typologies of urban dwellers (“the tribe of clerks,” the “race
of swell pick-pockets”), divisions of the population into age, gender, race and
ethnicity.Finally, though, his gaze
alights on an enigmatic character that eludes easy classification: “decrepit”
and “feeble,” yet “he rushed with an activity I could not have dreamed of
seeing in one so aged”; “without apparent aim,” yet characterized by “blood
thirstiness” and armed with a “dagger”.Seduced by these paradoxical attributes, Poe’s narrator follows the man
until sunrise, without, though, gaining any insight into the man’s history, nor
of his ultimate aims.

Within this brief fragment, we can
see multiple approaches to the urban collide: the first, the assignation of
types.The second, an ethnographic
approach premised on direct observation of a single individual walking the
streets.One attempts to make sense of
the whole—to say something, in this case, about London’s (or Baltimore’s or Philadelphia’s)
urban population and the growth of a heterosocial, public space in the mid-19th
century (Walkowitz 1992).The second,
the specificity of the individual in a particular place: what one could call the
“daily round” of the individual.But
both approaches prove inadequate to understanding the enigmatic man of the
crowd.

But what if Poe’s narrator had tried
a network approach?What if one could
show that the man of the crowd’s apparently aimless wanderings were, instead,
the outlines of a networked city connecting multitudes of nodes consisting of
places and people?What if one could
analyze those connections?As many have
shown, the city is, literally, the sum of its networks, assemblages of place
and connection that are simultaneously larger and smaller than the
geo-political boundaries of the urban (Pflieger and Rozenblat 2010).Within this concatenation, people and place
can be connected in myriad ways: the “strong” and “weak” ties that form the
basis of much of social network analysis, but also in the form of a variety of “latencies”
that, as Haythornthwaite (2002: 389) suggests, multiply in the age information and
communication technologies and add new potentials to the elaboration of the
urban networks around us.In a networked
world, Poe’s narrator might be able to exploit these connections in order to connect
to his man in the crowd and make sense of his world.

And, indeed, this is what happens
all of the time in urban life.Armed
with various ICT’s (information and communication technologies), people trace
complicated networks that include physical structures, transportation, socialites,
technologies, economies and symbolic communications.But by tweeting (or using me2day or yozm),
posting to blogs, utilizing geolocational apps and uploading photos and videos,
people multiply possibilities for place- and sense-making, mobilizing virtual connections
that might open up new possibilities for physical or spatial connections, that might make the strange into the famiilar.

This is an important difference from Poe's time. Poe's "man of the crowd" and Baudelaire's "flaneur" depend upon a uniquely urban condition: spending one's life surrounded by complete strangers. On the other hand, in our ICT-inflected lives, nobody can be a "complete" stranger. Rather, in the fuzzy logic of social media, people on the street present different quanta of latency--different potentialities of connection that we may or may not be able to exploit. When we attend a rally and marvel at the disparate groups that (momentarily) cohere in a place, we're witnessing the activation of some of those latent ties, and, most probably, their rapid dissolution.